Melinda French Gates knew her three children were at high risk of being detached from reality, so she says she took pains to keep them grounded.
With Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates as their father, Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe Gates were surrounded by a “crazy amount of wealth” and lived in an “extraordinarily large house,” French Gates told NPR’s “Fresh Air” podcast this week.
The philanthropist is worth $14.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. She said she reflected on her own childhood, and the tenets her middle-class parents instilled in her, to figure out how to stave off entitlement and elitism in her kids.
“I wanted them to have deep values. And I wanted them to know they were lucky,” French Gates said in the interview, part of the publicity tour for her new book: “The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward.”
French Gates, who divorced Gates in 2021 and stepped down as cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last year, said she enrolled her children in local schools instead of homeschooling them. She wanted her family to be part of the community, and believed it would benefit her children, she said.
Her kids did take some “knocks” as she moved them between numerous schools in search of the “right school for the right kid,” she said.
French Gates, who launched The Giving Pledge with Gates and Warren Buffett, made sure to expose her kids to the outside world whether they were overseas or at home.
“We went out and saw what life was like for other kids,” she said. “And even in the Seattle community, we would go out and work with the homeless, work in a community shelter, be on the lines where they’re feeding people.”
Those experiences opened their eyes to how lucky they were and made them think about their role in society, French Gates said. She added that her younger daughter, Phoebe, worked in Rwanda for several summers in middle and high school and lived with a local family there.
French Gates said that seeing the world gave her kids perspective about the harsh realities of life and the fact that Seattle was just a “tiny speck on the map.”
“And so I tried to ground them in that, ground them with chores, ground them with an allowance,” she said, adding that she made sure the hired help had good values too.
French Gates also discussed why she values community work on the “On With Kara Swisher” podcast this week. She said that helping the homeless, mentoring or helping kids with their homework, and serving food to the less fortunate teaches valuable lessons and makes people feel better for helping out.
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